Somehow still going leftism from who knows where. || "We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality." -- JG Ballard.

The personal is political, as feminists prior to the current generation of Twitter using crybabies had it. Back then it meant something, and perhaps it still does. Politics is always personal, of course. For some, it's a crusade or it is nothing. It's hard not to think though we've reached a peak for this, despite what it seems I'm writing about, I am in fact writing about myself style of political commentary.

Hadley Freeman doesn't really care about Israel or Gaza then, nor does she care about the Tricycle theatre asking the Jewish Film Festival to reconsider accepting money from the Israeli embassy, rather she's affronted that anyone would dare think she, a good liberal American cosmopolitan Jew might care to express her opinion about something serious for a change. In her entire piece we don't learn what she does think, although to judge by her quoting of Roger Cohen's claim that to not hold a negative view of Israel in Britain is to be considered without a conscience, and her end summation that media coverage in America and Europe is equally skewed, just in opposite directions, we can guess. Nor does she present any evidence anyone has told her or any other Jews what to think about Israel, but that's to be expected.

Other than crying antisemitism, the other perennial is victimhood, again because of its roots in reality. Once, the Golda Meir quote about forgiving Arabs for killing their children but not forgiving them for making Israel kill their children was poignant and reflected how Israel was surrounded by enemies. Now it can be wrongly interpreted all too easily, precisely because Palestinian life is regarded as cheap and the standard defence of every Israeli attack is they have no choice. The advert paid for by This World, co-written by Elie Wiesel, takes the "human shield" argument, whatever its extremely limited merits and debases it completely. We are the ones who are really suffering by having to kill children is its message. The Palestinians are responsible if they don't change their leaders; they must find "true Muslims", to represent them, Muslims acceptable to Likudniks. Even the main suspect in the murder of the Palestinian teenager Abu Khdeir, an act committed in revenge for the kidnap and slaughter of three Israeli teens, claims to have immediately felt remorse for his crime. Feel our pain, not theirs.

Not that we are all Palestinians has any true resonance beyond the demonstrations either. We are not Gazans, nor would we want to be. It's not enough to want justice for the Palestinians, the lifting of the Gaza blockade, the establishment of a viable Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital, we have to be them, not just express our most earnest solidarity. So too we must save Iraqis, at least once it's decided whom it is we should be demonstrating in favour of today. We either have to do so because this could have been prevented had we armed the rebels in Syria, although it's not made clear which rebels we were meant to have given heavy weaponry to, or because of our involvement in the Iraq war, or because of Sykes-Picot, or because of whatever other justification can be dredged up. Then again, according to the Sun, we can't do anything, although it isn't exactly clear what we're supposed to do about Australian jihadists taking their kids to Syria. Perhaps we were meant to provide him with a toy AK-47 which in turn would have prevented the Islamic State from taking over the north of Iraq?

For a nation supposedly turned isolationist by the vote on Syria, our other representatives in the media are as quick as ever to want the bombers sent in, without explaining what it would achieve, whether there is any sort of plan, or if attacking IS from the air will push them back. One has to wonder if this isn't about us rather than them. It shouldn't therefore surprise when an MP tries the same tactic, attempting to garner sympathy as he can't afford to house his family in Westminster under the new expenses regime. He wasn't prepared to have them live anywhere else in London, the public transport system in the capital being notoriously unreliable, and so would rather step down instead. As one of the few people who wouldn't begrudge MPs a second home in London with the tab picked up by the taxpayer, at least within reason, Mark Simmonds hasn't really helped out his colleagues. His wish to spend more time with his family could also have something to do with his missing the Syria vote last year, not hearing the division bell as he was discussing Rwanda with Justine Greening.

It could be in this age of Buzzfeed writers believe the only way to get readers interested is by making it personal. It could be the cult of the self continues to grow. It could be the only way to get anything worth doing done is to spell out why it matters to us, charity beginning at home, altruism no longer enough. It could be we can only talk about things when they happen to celebrities, even if then most reach immediately for contemptibly puerile clichés. At least it's talking, right? It's that it's also limiting, closes down debate, encourages personal abuse, which in turn leads to further articles about how terrible it is to be called names in the comment section and on social networks. What was it the original piece was about again?

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

There is a light and it never goes out.

As yesterday's post probably made clear, I'm not one for state approved close to enforced commemorations, or events in general. Remembrance Sunday just about stays on the right side of voluntary, non-politicised reflection, despite the efforts of some to turn it into a support the troops, why aren't you wearing a poppy type fest of unpleasantness. If you really were that moved, involved yesterday by the 100th anniversary of the start of four years of (then) unparalleled carnage and unnecessary suffering to turn out the lights and have a solitary candle burn between 10 and 11, good for you.

For most though I suspect it will have just passed them by entirely. There are no veterans of WWI left, and an ever dwindling number of those who can remember the conflict at all. It's also impossible to pretend WWI was a noble endeavour, at least compared to its successor, as arguable as the case is that one led inexorably to the other. You can debate all the myths or claimed myths, but none of it alters how the one real, overwhelming reason to remember is the unconscionable by modern standards waste of life, the millions sacrificed so the elite could (mostly) continue to live as they had, at least for a few more years. The collapse of empires affected us after the war, but only at the time in the form of the Bolsheviks pulling Russia out of the conflict. Yes, there were concessions given in the form of universal suffrage once it was over, and it took the rise of Nazism to make a major European war thinkable again, yet things for the most part stayed the same.

If you were expecting much, or indeed any of this to be reflected yesterday it was a forlorn hope. The leaders from the continent hinted at the role the EU has had in keeping the peace and we got the odd reference to what followed and that was pretty much your lot. Instead there was as much ceremony as you could take, a shallow sense of the loss so many went through and not much other than the hushed, reverential tones of the most maudlin reporters the BBC could get hold of in August. The Very Reverend Dr John Hall at the Westminster Abbey service went so far as to suggest, after mentioning the failed efforts to keep the peace, everyone spend a moment not in reflection but in repentance. Many of us have things we could, should repent, but guilt over or responsibility for the first world war isn't among them.

While there were then German apologies for the violation of Belgian neutrality, there weren't any admissions the war as a whole was something to be regretted, just the loss of life. Particularly abrasive was the involvement of the royals, with there being no recognition of the major role the European if not British monarchs had in the conflict and its continuation. As the Graun remarks in its leader, there was also little thought given to how much this country, Europe and the world has changed since 1914, perhaps because all those at the forefront of the commemorations would much prefer the certainties and deference of that era compared to our unruly and acerbic times. Queenie we're told was spending the day after a private memorial quietly contemplating it all, and she definitely had the right idea.

Without wanting to go the full Simon Jenkins, it's also a difficult sell for politicians who find it remarkably easy to send in the bombers, agitate for arms sales and compete over issuing the blandest statement on the massacre of innocents by allies to convince they take anything from WWI except the idea Britain always has been and always will be great. David Cameron, bless him, mentioned the role the navy played last week in evacuating British citizens from Libya without pausing to consider whether the need to do so could have been linked to the regime change NATO all but instigated in the country.

Maybe it was this disjunct between Cameron's solemn intoning of learning lessons from history at the same time as doing nothing about Gaza that finally convinced Baroness Warsi to resign, or it could have been the symbolism of extinguishing a candle at the aforementioned Westminster Abbey service. Either way, there is nothing that aggravates politicians as much as one of their colleagues suddenly having a fit of conscience: it suggests they don't have such pangs, when they do. They just don't act on them, or persuade themselves the ends justify the means. Read the contempt expressed for Clare Short in Alastair Campbell's diaries, which at times verges on the sexist, the same echoes you can clearly detect in the response from some Tories. Warsi was probably surprised to survive the reshuffle, and in her resignation letter expressly mentions both Ken Clarke and Dominic Grieve leaving the government, the loss of "their experience and expertise" as becoming "very apparent". As direct criticism of your party leader goes, it doesn't get much more personal.

Nor does describing the stance taken by the coalition as "morally indefensible". Images from Gaza of the destruction wreaked in the neighbourhoods that saw the fiercest fighting are reminiscent of the streets of Aleppo and Homs, so complete is the devastation, only this happened not over months but days. No language is strong enough to condemn Assad and his forces, yet criticism of Israeli tactics, while beefed up in recent days, has remained muted by comparison.

Warsi's resignation will be shrugged off. Not enough people care about Gaza; it won't decide many, if any votes next year. If she has kept a diary of her time in office and publishes it before the election, then many will conclude her real motivation was personal gain. Nor can we pretend this is the first government to cower when it comes to Israel; Tony Blair did everything possible during the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah war to delay a ceasefire, rather than try to put an end to the conflict.

Blair's legacy is even more fearful when it comes to Iraq. Under reported has been the latest major propaganda release from ISIS I mentioned last week. It contains what I can only describe as the most disturbing video footage I have ever seen, and I'm sorry to say I've watched a lot of jihadi releases and "real gore" clips. Some begging for their lives, dozens of Shia men are taken into sandy wasteland where all ordered to lie on their fronts. A masked fighter then walks along the line, carefully firing a single shot from an AK47 into each man's head. In another section, a group of men are hurried to the bank of a river (as the footage is apparently from Tikrit, it has to be the Tigris), one of their captors slapping them on the back as they pass. Once there, on a concrete section smeared with blood, each is taken to the edge and a single shot from a pistol fired into their heads, the victim then pushed or thrown into the water. In its former incarnations ISIS carried out a number of executions of groups of men which were filmed, but never were so many killed as in this video. Nor did we see them being led to their death, the majority going meekly, in the same way as so many thousands of Jews were taken to their deaths by the Einsatzgruppen, walking in line, told to lie side by side, waiting for it to be their turn to be shot in the back of the head. A group that is unafraid to record its crimes against war, against humanity, potentially the beginnings of a genocide, is one that apparently believes its otherwise ridiculous claims of being the Islamic state, immovable. A century on from the "war to end all wars", it's the far more recent ones we entered into that should be reflected on, troubling us most.

Relating this to Gaza, Israel has no intention of fully reoccupying the Strip despite calls for just that from the far-right, not least as it would give the militant groups ever greater opportunities of abducting soldiers than "Operation Protective Edge" currently has. It can't then force a victory that way. It can try and exhaust the very ability of Hamas and Islamic Jihad etc to resist by keeping the military operation going for so long that their stockpiled caches of rockets and ammunition are completely depleted, but they can't know how long that will take, nor is there a guarantee the political pressure from the international community won't, finally, become too much to ignore. Similarly, they don't know how many actual fighters Hamas etc have, nor can they trust their actions won't have pushed those with sympathy for the militant groups into joining/rejoining.

Just as there can only be peace through a negotiated settlement, so it appears there can now only be no peace through negotiations. This is what is meant by the idea of "demilitarising" Gaza, something we've heard a lot of the past few days. While it's not by any means clear just how "demilitarising" Gaza would be achieved, as the idea of UN monitors disarming Hamas while at the same time trying to provide for the hundreds of thousands reliant on UNRWA's various programmes, the implications are obvious. Hamas, despite all the obstacles in its path, including the blockade and deteriorating relations with former allies such as Syria and Iran, has succeeded in becoming just that little more like Hezbollah in Lebanon. During Operation Cast Lead, Hamas or other groups killed 6 Israeli soldiers. 56 have so far been killed in this latest conflict, including 5 inside Israel itself when Hamas used one of its "terror tunnels" to attack a military outpost.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Our country is a graveyard.

Gentlemen, you have transformed
our country into a graveyard
You have planted bullets in our heads,
and organized massacres
Gentlemen, nothing passes like that
without account
All that you have done
to our people is
registered in notebooks

Something about this story doesn't add up. To be precise, this is the sort of story a five-year-old would find difficult to believe. It leads you to one conclusion, and one conclusion only: the IDF doesn't care what it hits in Gaza, and it will always blame Hamas regardless of how bad it looks. This is the exact sort of behaviour we condemn when it's the Syrian military doing it. They're the same kind of lies we find outrageous when they're told by the Russians. Yet still our representatives will keep repeating Israel has the right to defend itself. The Palestinians, as said before, only have the right to die.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

When words are not equal.

And what do you know, about alienation honey? Yeah please, explain how it feels.

There are numerous ways to shut down debate when it comes to Israel/Palestine. The most obvious, and the most used and abused, is to cry antisemitism, although it must be stressed the line between vehement anti-Zionism and antisemitism is often an extremely fine one. We saw this not too long ago when the Israeli ambassador to the UK denounceda Gerald Scarfe cartoon in the Sunday Times (having read a copy at the weekend, calling it a comic does a disservice to the Beano) as antisemitic on the grounds he portrayed Binyamin Netanyahu with a big nose, encasing Palestinians in a wall where the bricks were held together with blood. This apparently invoked the blood libel and the age old antisemitic trope of caricaturing Jews as having big/long facial appendages. As I noted at the time, it's fine for those who want to cry racism to do so on flimsy evidence, as Twitter would be even more unprofitable than it currently is if people didn't; when actual state actors start doing it to silence criticism, something much more sinister is at work.

When Lib Dem MP David Ward tweeted, saying "If I were in Gaza, would I fire a rocket? Probably yes" he was conducting a similar thought experiment. You could say it's a rather redundant one, as transplanting yourself into such a situation without also taking into account how different your life would be makes it likely your entire world view would also be drastically altered, but at the same time it raises the question. What would you do? Would you resist as well, even if not necessarily alongside Hamas? I find it likely I probably would.

Even to pose the question the other way it seems is to provide Hamas with succour, to suggest there is an equivalence between Hamas rockets and Israel defending itself. Palestinians, as we really should have learned by now, don't have the same right to target those the UN says may have committed war crimes. Indeed, according to the berk's berk, Tory chairman Grant Shapps, Ward's tweet may have incited violence, while Labour's Douglas Alexander said his "vile comments are as revealing as they are repellent". Quickly the party issued a statement clarifying the obvious, that he was pointing out how people can be driven to such desperate measures, but not before the Board of Deputies of British Jews said Nick Clegg should expel Ward from the party. Just as with everything else, words are simply not equal.

We must start though with the shooting down of flight MH17. Here is the worst example imaginable of what happens when you give heavy weaponry to amateurs, or as could be the case, when professionals are made to answer to dilettantes. As soon as the news emerged a civilian plane had came down in the area where the eastern Ukrainian rebels have been pushed back to it was apparent what had happened. Regardless of how the Donetsk People's Republic fighters got their hands on a Buk, whether supplied directly by Russia or captured from the Ukrainians, they couldn't have kept fighting this long without the tacit, barely disguised support of Putin. He bears a heavy responsibility for the tragedy, and the fact he either refused or failed to pressure the rebels into allowing immediate access to the crash site so investigators could carry out their work speaks of the inhumanity of the Russian president.

Those quite rightly demanding justice and the handing over of those responsible might well reflect on the punishment given to the US navy crew whom unintentionally killed 290 civilians on Iran Air Flight 655: they received their medals, while the captain got the Legion of Merit. Few have considered the irony either of the media traipsing all over what would normally be a crime scene, access carefully controlled so as not to lose evidence or contaminate the area. Indeed, if the scene had been quickly handed over to investigators, it's possible the bodies of the victims could have stayed where they landed just as long if not longer than they did; that was certainly the case with Lockerbie.

Watching last Friday's session at the United Nations Security Council was an instruction in how diplomacy does and doesn't work. The anger of US ambassador Samantha Power was palpable, her words at times mawkish. "We now all know the letter I stands for infant," she said. It doesn't of course when it comes to Gaza, where instead it must stand for irrelevant. If the same politicians who have barely been able to contain their contempt and rage at Russia over MH17 directed even a tenth of that feeling at Israel, the pressure would have almost certainly already told on Netanyahu.

We've heard it all before, and no doubt we'll hear it again. One thing we do seem to have been spared this time is the Palestinians don't feel pain such is their martyrdom ideation line, perhaps because the grieving for those killed has been there for all to see. So too we've seen more reports from the "Sderot cinema" or other vantage points where an extreme, tiny minority of Israelis go to watch the carnage being wreaked on Gaza, cheering it on, just as vengeful and filled with hate as we're so often informed Palestinian children are brought up to be. Whether they really approve of the horrific consequences on the ground, when 19 children were killed in a single strike, apparently just as guilty as the solitary target, we can't know. They surely however demand justice just as much as the infants on board the MH17 did.

In the wreckage of the home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed
Salem's father, approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he
opened to reveal pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. "This
is my son," he said.

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

You will be buried in the same box as a killer.

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, the estimated time between the warning a Soviet ICBM was heading towards your area and the actual strike itself was four minutes, although most think even that was a tad optimistic. It certainly didn't leave long to get to anywhere that might be safer, unless say you lived within running distance of an underground station and weren't knocked over and trampled to death by all the others with the same idea.

Fortunately, our good friends the Americans remain the only people to have decided to go nuclear. Less fortunately for the Palestinians, the latest humanitarian gesture on the part of the IDF is to fire a "warning" missile at houses they intend to destroy, not just leaving it to chance the occupants will answer the phone. Caught on film is one house getting a "knock on the roof", then being struck by the following, far more destructive projectile. The time between the warning and the attack? Four minutes.

We shouldn't feel sorry though for the owner and his family, or indeed any others living in the building as multiple families usually do in the crowded Gaza strip. The owner's sons are apparently Hamas members, therefore completely justifying the razing of his house. Moreover, as the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahusaid, since Hamas rejected the terms of the proposed Egyptian ceasefire everything that happens in Gaza from now on is solely their responsibility.

Israel doesn't just have the right to defend itself, it has a responsibility to do so. The Palestinians by contrast don't just have the right to die, they have a responsibility to. Hamas might rule the Gaza strip, and they might be responsible for everything that happens there, but they don't have the right to defend their territory, to resist. Their use of rockets is a war crime, as they are too indiscriminate to properly target anything or anyone that could be considered as legitimate, not that there is anywhere in Israel that could be considered a legitimate military target anyway.

To step back from rocking the snark for just a second, Hamas was far too hasty in dismissing the Egyptian ceasefire proposal. You can understand why they did; it only offered further talks rather anything substantive. When we've been here twice before, Israel making promises to loosen the siege of Gaza that have subsequently come to nothing, it's not a surprise Hamas wants something this time they can hold the Israelis to. In both previous examples it was also Israel rather than Hamas that broke the fragile peace. Nonetheless, when the option is on the table to halt the suffering of the people Hamas claims to represent, to not at least give it a chance is close to unconscionable.

True, it's far easier to sell a ceasefire when the number of casualties on your side is 1, rather than 200 as it was yesterday for the Palestinians and there's little to show for it. It doesn't however absolve Hamas of continuing with a policy which failed in the past and is going to again this time. Israel has no intention of lifting the siege of Gaza, nor does Egypt under Sisi have any intention of making life easier for a movement that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood. The only way of putting Israel under pressure over the Palestinians is to threaten and if necessary introduce boycotts, just as John Kerry warned Netanyahu were on the horizon if he continued to refuse to countenance even the slightest gestures needed to keep the talks with Fatah on track. Netanyahu's response was to "wag his finger" at the US secretary of state. Responsibility, as we've seen, is something only the Palestinians fail to exercise.

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

These perfect abattoirs.

Only a god can bruise. Only a god can soothe. Only a god reserves the right to forgive those who revile him.

How many ways are there to say exactly the same thing differently? For those whom (rightly) argue that history doesn't repeat, it's difficult to explain why it is Israel and Hamas seem stuckin a perpetual loopof action and reaction, neither side moving forward, neither falling behind, while the poor bastards stuck in the middle have to suffer the consequences over and over again.

If there is a slight difference this time round, it's that Hamas can't really claim it was Israel that started it. The kidnap and murder of Gilad Shaer, Naftali Fraenkel, and Eyal Yifrah may not have been carried out by Hamas members, or with the knowledge of the leadership, but nor have they so much as condemned the heinous crime. Anyone mentioning one of the teenagers was old enough to serve in the IDF, as all Israelis are required to, or that they were settlers (or rather the children of settlers) is making abominable excuses. They had as much right to life as Muhammad Abu Khudair did, the 17-year-old abducted and set alight in an apparent act of vengeance.

This supposedly was a battle neither side wanted, only for them to discover there wasn't a way around it. Bombing Gaza never turns out badly for whichever prime minister orders it. Hamas by contrast seems to believe the only way to get back its previous levels of support is by standing up to the onslaught, apparently unconcerned by how many civilians die in the process, thinking each death will only create more resistance. Such grim calculus, such cynicism on both sides.

At this point, it's always worth remembering the Quartet's special envoy is a certain Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.

Rhetoric bound to incite, designed to incite, is nothing new in the Middle East. Calls for revenge are commonplace, with both sides in Israel/Palestine issuing them. Rarely though has an Israeli prime minister been so forthright, so irresponsible in their choice of words as Benjamin Netanyahu has since the discovery of the bodies of the three missing Israeli teenagers, presumed murdered by Palestinian terrorists. "They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by animals," his initial statement read. "We'll expand the battle as much as needed. No matter where they hide, we’ll reach them until the last one and we’ll take our revenge," he added in his eulogy at the boys' funeral.

Israel has since responded in the only way she knows how, by declaring that a further 3,000 new homes will be built, illegally, on the occupied West Bank. As a result, Foreign Office minister Alastair Burt summoned the Israeli ambassador to let him know our deep displeasure. Here's a thought: considering that one of the assurances we required from the Palestinians was that they drop preconditions to talks, their only one being that the Israelis declare a halt to all settlement building in the occupied territories, wouldn't it have made sense to vote in favour of their first step towards statehood when the threatened Israeli response was to, err, accelerate settlement building even further? Just who is it here that's in breach of international law? When are we finally going to recognise that there isn't going to be a negotiated peace when Israel has no intention of evacuating the West Bank settlements, the presence of which make a Palestinian state unviable? When, in short, are we going to start treating Israel as the rogue state it is?

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I'd like to give William Hague a few assurances as well.

How times change. In Tony Blair's dog days, his refusal to push for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hizbullah-Lebanon war was in contrast to the stance of David Cameron's newly detoxified Conservative party, with William Hague denouncing the destruction of much of southern Lebanon as "disproportionate". To begin with, it looked as though the Conservatives allied with the Liberal Democrats would continue with this more critical stance on Israel now they were in power: Cameron, visiting Turkey in the aftermath of the raid on the Gaza flotilla, described the impoverished and cut-off territory as a "prison camp".

It's also that at least the first of the "assurances" demanded is so outrageous. Just what exactly is the point of requiring the PA to return to peace talks without conditions when it's so abundantly clear that Israel is not prepared to make even the slightest of concessions, even as a gesture of goodwill? If there is ever going to be a negotiated peace and a two-state solution, then the building of settlements in the occupied West Bank has to end. It really is that simple. Requesting that the PA set aside this most basic of requirements, one which it has to be remembered the Obama administration also demanded from the Israelis and was ignored over is ridiculous.

Indeed, this refusal by the Israelis to put even a temporary halt to settlement building is exactly what led to the process at the UN from the PA in the first place: they recognised, sadly, that the talks were going nowhere due to consistent Israeli intransigence, often backed by the US. The Palestine papers revealed that Condoleezza Rice told them they would never have a state if they didn't accept that the settlements of Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim would remain Israeli territory, regardless of the illegality of both under international law. The PA by contrast offered what even Tzipi Livni recognised was the "biggest Jerusalem in history", and yet was still rebuffed.

Hague's claim then that the PA's attempt to gain recognition could set back the peace process is a nonsense. There is no peace process to be set back, for the reason that the situation on the ground has changed, both in Israel and Palestine. Never has it been so clear that Israel's aim is to make the establishment of a viable Palestinian state impossible, such is the continued colonisation of the West Bank and the near to completion construction of the wall separating the occupied territory from Israel. Anything less than something approaching the 1967 borders will be unacceptable to the Palestinian people, and Israel has no intention of repeating the evacuation of Gaza, even if it were to lead to peace. At the same time, the PA has become almost an irrelevance, weakened both by Israel's emasculation of the West Bank and the rise of Hamas. Rightly or not, the Palestinian and the Arab street see the resistance of Hamas as achieving results, while the PA's recognition of Israel has led to 20 years of unrelenting occupation.

If anything, the reluctance of some western states to support the Palestinian bid is likely to further weaken the PA and so the merest chance of a return to negotiations than it being the other way around. They have after all tried renouncing violence, recognising Israel, face-to-face talks under successive American administrations, and applying for full recognition from the UN Security Council, all so far for nowt. Non-member observer status would provide a moment of respite. By not supporting even this slight move towards statehood for Palestine, it just further highlights the utter hypocrisy of our support for some liberation movements while stymieing the baby steps of others.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Already looking forward to the next.

The news coming through this evening that a ceasefire has been agreed between Israel and Hamas is undoubtedly welcome. Any halt to the violence, however short-lived, is to be applauded. In practice however, the agreement brokered by Egypt has done little more than return us to the situation prior to the assassination of Ahmed al-Jabari last Wednesday. While in theory the deal calls for the opening of the crossings into Gaza, the implementation of the lifting of the economic blockade of the strip is only to be discussed after 24 hours of "de-escalation", more than suggesting that as has happened before, further progress is highly unlikely. Dubious as it always was that Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak would have countenanced any loosening of the blockade when the whole point of "Operation Pillar of Defense" was to show themselves as strong, decisive military leaders before a waiting electorate, the deal seems to have merely set up the next assault on a terrorised territory and its imprisoned people.

The deal seems to have achieved little for Hamas either. Once again, their infrastructure in Gaza has been either destroyed or substantially damaged, and the people that both support and oppose them have suffered terribly in the process. They may have shown they've acquired longer range missiles, yet the ability to fire rockets at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem serves little purpose when they either fail to hit their targets (if there is one in the first place) or are intercepted by the Iron Dome defence system. The initial sounding of raid alarms in those cities might have a psychological effect in the short term and lead a few Israelis to wonder whether they really are being wisely led by their politicians, especially seeing as it was only after the assault on Gaza began that the Fajr-5s were fired, but it's liable to be fleeting in the extreme.

Nor have our leaders altered their tune one iota. Who knows whether behind the scenes pressure was put on Netanyahu not to launch a ground offensive as his predecessors did; what we do know is that there's been barely a word of public criticism for how the offensive was conducted. Israel has once again got away with targeting ambulances, journalists, and targets that simply can't be in any way construed as connected with Hamas, while the deaths of innocents alongside alleged militants are no longer even "collateral damage", rather "operational failures".

As so often in the past, this difference in approach is then reinforced by reporting that at worst actively dehumanises the Palestinians. Jodi Rudoren's report for the New York Times of the Dalu family's funerals seemed determined to emphasise these apparent differences: they don't so much mourn as accept their fate, such is the "culture of martyrdom that pervades this place", nor are they "overcome with emotion nor fed up, perhaps because the current casualty count pales in comparison to the 1,400 lost four years ago". Rudoren's inference seems clear: only when so many are killed does their numbness and anger get overwhelmed by sadness. In posts on her Facebook page, Rudoren went further, saying the reaction from some of those who had lost relatives was "ho-hum". Even the usually excellent Jeremy Bowen made similar references on his 10 O'Clock News broadcast last night.

It's true that some of the most hardline figures in Gaza do put martyrdom and resistance above everything else, and this is always going to be most evident when the international media are around. That this is anything approaching universal however is utter nonsense, as countless photographsfrom Gazashow. Whether it's the death of family members or the loss of their home, Palestinians, amazingly, do have emotions. Cut them and they bleed.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Neither one thing nor the other.

I realise it's a motif I've been over-dependent on recently, but such has been the scale of bullshit of late that it's been difficult not to feel like we've been mysteriously plunged into a parallel universe. A couple of months back David Cameron appeared before the UN general assembly, and reaching for the most emotive imagery he could muster, he said the UN had been stained by the blood of children killed in Syria. Not, you'll note, that China and Russia had the deaths of protesters on their consciences through their blocking of security council resolutions, but that the UN itself was in some way responsible for the impasse. As for our own role, we naturally couldn't be blamed for having abused the doctrine of the responsibility to protect in Libya, overthrowing Gaddafi when the UN resolution which authorised the no-fly zone called for a ceasefire between the two sides, and so setting Russia and China dead against any repeat.

The use of language similar to Cameron's could of course never be countenanced in relation to Israel. It doesn't matter how many minors are accidentally killed, or even deliberately targeted, of which there have been 1,338 since September 2000 in both the West Bank and Gaza, their blood simply isn't worth as much. The closest our politicians have ever come to denouncing Israeli tactics is debating whether or not reducing much of Lebanon and Gaza to rubble is "disproportionate". Those with exceptional memories might recall that during the Israel-Lebanon-Hizbullah war William Hague went so far as to use the D word, much to the outrage of Stephen Pollard. Once in power, the Tories have returned to type, with Hague declaring Hamas "bears principal responsibility" for the latest murderous assault on an tiny, impoverished, cut-off territory.

Isn't this almost irrelevant when the most important thing is to get rid of Assad? Well yes, but clearly we have different standards when it comes to the Palestinians. By any measure Hamas has far more popular support than this latest Syrian concoction, and yet we refuse to recognise it and its right to defend the people of Gaza against Israeli aggression. Leaving aside Hamas, William Hague also made clear today that the government is yet to make its mind up as to whether support the move by the Palestinian Authority to apply for recognition at the UN general assembly. If we won't even support the move by the Fatah leadership when we supposedly still want two states, why pursue such similarly futile gestures when it comes to Syria?

It's fairly apparent that despite the whisperings in the ear of Nick Robinson we have little to no intention of arming the Syrian opposition, let alone going further and actively intervening. The most we seem willing to provide is communications equipment, and frankly, that's one thing the Syrian fighters on the ground seem to have plenty of. I'm incidentally all for the arming of the Syrian opposition if the anti-aircraft missiles the rebels are desperate for head straight afterwards to Gaza to be used in self-defence against fighter jets, but not if they're soon being used to target passenger planes, something al-Qaida has previous in.

Our position is ultimately neither one thing nor the other. We support the Saudis in wanting to maintain the Sunni domination of the Middle East while weakening Iran, not so much as mentioning the unpleasantness in Qatif, Bahrain or indeed in Jordan, and yet we leave the actual arming of those pursuing what has turned into a sectarian war in Syria to other people. This peeves the Saudis and Qataris, and also peeves those like me who see the hypocrisy in our position of wanting a free Middle East except in those places where we always have and always will support despots. Meanwhile, we ignore those who've yearned for their own state for over 60 years, while recognising a group which was created last Tuesday and has no real support whatsoever as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Syrian people. Once upon a time, we were colonalists. Now we simply act as though we still are.

Away from the accounts provided by sites such as Electronic Intifada, which notes this latest outbreak of violence effectively began when a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by the IDF while he was playing football, sparking a wave of retaliatory rocket attacks, the most honest piece to feature in a British newspaper was in the Graun, written by the deputy head of Hamas's political bureau. This is how skewed reporting on Gaza has become: while the IDFtweets incessantly and Israeli politicians and spokesmen use almost the exact same formulations as they did four years previous, all of which is lapped up by the mainstream media and barely questioned, those associated with Hamas, a supposed terrorist organisation dedicated to the destruction of Israel, are the ones telling the closest to the truth.

Then again, in the eyes of Israeli politicians, the IDF and indeed much of the media, there is no such thing as an innocent Gazan citizen. Anyone and anything can be targeted as long as they can be linked with Hamas, however tenuously. Buildings struck are Hamas buildings; schools are Hamas-run, as are hospitals. During Operation Cast Lead, the wholesale murder of police officers was justified on the basis they were Hamas police officers, and the argument has since been taken to its logical conclusion. Israel is of course perfectly prepared to make long-standing agreements with Hamas, whereby Hamas pledges to do the best it can to keep rocket fire from other militant groups to a minimum in return for a cessation of air strikes, but when it's election time and there are votes to be won from an ever more hardline public, Hamas once again becomes the implacable genocidal foe that must be put out of commission once and for all.

As little as possible then is explained, lest it alter the narrative that Israel is the victim rather than the aggressor. Electoral cynicism is skirted over, as is the blockade of Gaza that prevents civilians from escaping from what is effectively a free fire zone. At least in Syria those in the firing line between rebels and the regime can for the most part escape should they choose; those in Gaza have no such option, unless they have a medical complaint so urgent that even the Israelis can't refuse them access to hospitals outside of the Strip. The history of the occupation, the Oslo accords, the setting up of the Palestinian authority and the lack of progress ever since, overwhelmingly the result of Israeli intransigence, goes by unmentioned. That the settlements in the West Bank continue to be expanded, with ever more Palestinian land seized and cut off isn't relevant. Palestinian resistance is condemned, whether it's through rockets or stone throwing, while the attempt to gain statehood through the UN is blocked. Despite all this injustice, the Palestinian cause only grows stronger, and the strength and belief of the people remains undimmed. They will one day have a state, and one day Israel's crimes will be brought to account. That day cannot come soon enough.